... The Andrews family was "very poor and we lived in a bad slum area of
London," Andrews recalled, adding, "That was a very black period in my
life." According to Andrews, her stepfather was violent and an
alcoholic.[9] Ted Andrews twice, while drunk, tried to get into bed with his stepdaughter, resulting in Andrews fitting a lock on her door.[9]
But, as the stage career of Ted and Barbara Andrews improved, they were
able to afford to move to better surroundings, first to Beckenham and then, as the war ended, back to the Andrews' hometown of Hersham.
The Andrews family took up residence at the Old Meuse, in West Grove,
Hersham, a house (now demolished) where Andrews' maternal grandmother
had served as a maid.[8] ...

Yes, I realize that she's been in some movies, but, in my opinion, she's still a long way from being considered a movie star. Every time I hear the name Oprah Winfrey, actress is the last thing that comes to mind, not to mention movie star.

She IS a Movie Star AND A Talk Show HostI guess 2 Oscar nominations go to TV Actors and Talk Show Hosts only.Did I mention 2 Oscar Nominations.Did I forget She has been awarded an Honorary OscarNominee
Golden Globe
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion PictureThe Color Purple (1985)2014
Nominee
BAFTA Film Award
Best Supporting ActressThe Butler (2013)2013
Winner
AAFCA Award
Best Supporting ActressThe Butler (2013)1999
Nominee
Image Award
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Motion PictureBeloved (1998)

I'm not trying to disregard her work as an actress, far from it. What I'm trying to say is Oprah, in the eyes of the general public (me included) is not seen as a movie star.

To give you a random example, 50 Cent. Is he an actor or a singer/rapper? (In the eyes of the general public)

To give you another example, Seth Rogen. Is he an actor or a movie producer? (In the eyes of the general public)

Even with Oprah's nominations and awards, I think she's not considered a movie star. But, if you believe I should add her to the list, I will. It looks obvious that you have more knowledge about the movies/tv series world than me, and if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'll learn (:

Put her in before it gets out you said she is not a Movie Star.I'm older. She Was a star first, Talk show host later. This should never be a what have you done lately world. It should be how has your lifetime of accomplishments enriched us.

Oprah - Winfrey has stated she was molested by her cousin, uncle, and a family friend, starting when she was nine years old, something she first announced to her viewers on a 1986 episode of her TV show regarding sexual abuse. When Winfrey discussed the alleged abuse with family members at age 24, they reportedly refused to believe her account. At 13, after suffering what she described as years of abuse, Winfrey ran away from home. When she was 14, she became pregnant but her son was born prematurely and he died shortly after birth. Winfrey later stated she felt betrayed by the family member who had sold the story of her son to the National Enquirer in 1990

Swank - When she was 15, her parents separated, and her mother, supportive of her daughter's desire to act, moved with her to Los Angeles, where they lived out of their car until Swank's mother saved enough money to rent an apartment.

FYC:Tyler Perry - Perry once said his father's answer to everything was to "beat it out of you". As a child, Perry once went so far as to attempt suicide in an effort to escape his father's beatings. In contrast to his father, his mother took him to church each week, where he sensed a certain refuge and contentment. At age 16, he had his first name legally changed from Emmitt to Tyler in an effort to distance himself from his father. Many years later, after seeing the film Precious, Perry was moved to reveal for the first time that he had been molested by a friend's mother at age 10; he was also molested by three men prior to this, and later learned his own father had molested his friend. A DNA test taken by Perry indicated that Emmitt Sr. was not Perry's biological father.

Ashley Judd - In her 2011 memoir “All That Is Bitter And Sweet,” Ashley Judd revealed the shocking details of her youth as a victim of incest, sexual abuse, neglect and exposure to drug use during her mother’s rise to fame as a country super star. Her many traumatic experiences even caused Judd to contemplate suicide on multiple occasions. She wrote, “I took to playing with mom’s gun, trying to decide if it would be worth it to shoot myself. There were many days after school I would expertly check the chamber, load bullets, give it a spin and with a jerk of my wrist click the chamber into place, cock the trigger and then hold then gun to my right temple. To me, the way my family lived was already killing me. The shame and the keeping ourselves sick through secretiveness is one of the things we all need to have the courage to undo,” she said of her decision to share her troubling history with the world.

Mo'Nique - During a 2008 Essence magazine interview, Mo'Nique revealed that she was sexually abused by her brother Gerald from ages 7–11; he went on to sexually abuse another girl and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. After her twin boys were born in 2005, Mo'Nique cut off all contact with Gerald. On April 19, 2010, he admitted on Oprah to sexually abusing her over several years. He also was abused by family members and struggled with substance abuse.

Kelsey Grammer - Grammer was two years old when his parents divorced. Grammer and his sister Karen were subsequently raised by their mother and grandparents in New Jersey. The family relocated to Florida, and shortly afterwards his grandfather died when Kelsey was twelve. Two years later, in 1968, Frank Allen Grammer, his father, was murdered. On July 1, 1975, Grammer's younger sister, 18-year-old Karen Grammer, was abducted, raped, and murdered by Freddie Glenn, Michael Corbett, and one other man. Grammer, then 20, identified her body. He and his sister had been close, and he was devastated by her death; his later bouts of alcoholism and drug addiction were fueled in part by guilt and depression. His two half-brothers, Stephen and Billy, perished in a scuba-diving accident in the Virgin Islands.

Dylan McDermott - Diane was fifteen and Richard was seventeen when McDermott was born; by 1967, the couple had divorced, and Diane and her two children were living with her mother. On February 9, 1967, Diane was killed. Her death was originally ruled an accident, but police later claimed that evidence they had found would be enough to file murder charges against John Sponza, who had been living with Diane at the time. Sponza told authorities that Diane accidentally shot herself after picking up a gun he had been cleaning. Sponza, who police say had ties to organized crime, was killed in 1972; his body was found in the trunk of a car in a Waltham, Massachusetts, grocery store parking lot.

Woody Harrelson - Harrelson was born in 1961 in Midland, Texas, to Diane (née Oswald) and Charles Voyde Harrelson. His father was a convicted contract killer, who received a life sentence for the 1979 killing of Federal Judge John H. Wood Jr. in San Antonio, Texas; Harrelson has stated that his father was rarely around growing up. He died in the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility on March 15, 2007. The family was poor, reliant on his mother's secretary wage.

Richard Pryor - Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor grew up in the brothel run by his grandmother, Marie Carter, where his alcoholic mother, Gertrude L. was a prostitute. His father, LeRoy was a former boxer and hustler. After Gertrude abandoned him when he was ten, Pryor was raised primarily by Marie, a tall, violent woman who would beat him for any of his eccentricities. Pryor was one of four children raised in his grandmother's brothel. He was sexually abused at age seven, and expelled from school at the age of fourteen.

Liev Schreiber - When his mother was 12, her mother (Schreiber's grandmother) was lobotomized. When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to Canada, winding up in the unincorporated rural community of Winlaw, Prior to this time, according to Schreiber's father, at the beginning of their marriage (in San Francisco), Schreiber's mother had a bad experience on LSD. Over the next four years, she was repeatedly admitted to hospitals and underwent therapy.After Schreiber's father threatened to admit her to a mental institution, she left with her son. With his father in pursuit, Schreiber and his mother were trailed by private detectives in various states; when he was three, his father kidnapped him from an upstate New York commune where Heather had gone to escape detection. By the time Schreiber was four, he was living with her on the fourth floor of a dilapidated walk-up at First Avenue and First Street in New York City (his half brothers from her first marriage were with their father in a duplex on Central Park West), and he was the object of a fierce custody battle, which bankrupted his maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram. Milgram, who was the most significant male in Schreiber's youth, played the cello and owned Renoir etchings, and made his living by delivering meat to restaurants. When Schreiber was five, his parents divorced; his mother won custody, and the two moved to a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where he was raised and first began his career in theater by enrolling in Joffrey Ballet School of NY. Growing up, they frequently had no electricity, hot water, or even beds. His mother was "a highly cultured eccentric" who supported them by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating papier-mâché puppets." On Schreiber's 16th birthday, his mother bought him a motorcycle "to promote fearlessness." The critic John Lahr wrote in a 1999 New Yorker profile that, "To a large extent, Schreiber's professional shape-shifting and his uncanny instinct for isolating the frightened, frail, goofy parts of his characters are a result of being forced to adapt to his mother's eccentricities. It's both his grief and his gift." He endured her mood swings and bohemian proclivities, which included making him take Hindu names, wear yoga shirts, and forcing Liev, briefly, to go to an ashram school in Connecticut when he was 12. Schreiber's mother forbade Schreiber from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actors were Charlie Chaplin and Basil Rathbone. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Schreiber, known then as Shiva Das, lived at the Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville East, in Pomfret, Connecticut. (obvs this will have to be cut way down. I just thought I'd include it all so you guys read how crazy his childhood was!)

Not sure that growing in a poor environment is an obstacle, especially when you have the right combination of talents and look, and I mean that for Scarlett Johansen as much as I mean that for Charlie Chaplin.

It became a cliché to hear people telling you how tough it's been for them, they got no support, no money, they were poor, abused, they started from scratch, no one trusted them etc. Actually, and I am not a cynical man, I believe these are blessings in disguise, the less you have when you start, the hungrier, the more eager to conquer and triumph you are. I'm not saying it's a universal truth but only saying that it is easier to get from 0 to 1000 than to get from 500 to 1000.

Many kids grow up in a good family environment, surrounded with love and support, and are pampered all their lives, hearing how exceptional they are, destined to accomplish great things and since they believe and love their parents, they think it's gonna happen until they realize that the "great bookmaker of life" can bet against them as well.

Growing poor doesn't prevent you from becoming a heavyweight champion (on the contrary) or being beautiful, or being a nerd and studying hard and being a jurist or physicist (remember Will Hunting) so I can admire someone who beat the odds by defeating handicap or a disease or a really big trauma, but poverty has been associated to so many celebrities' real-life narratives that it became a cliché.

But if I had to suggest one celebrity, it would be Sylvester Stallone. I would have put him on the top of the list actually, it's one thing to become a star but being a two-bit actor, connected to a few thugs role and a soft-porn movie and then writing a script on your own, getting the role and making it the highest-grossing film of the year and the Best Picture winner, that's what I call beating the odds.

If being poor is not considered an obstacle, very few things can be considered as such. I realize that the lack of money and other things can give you a lot more motivation to succeed and rise above expectations, but that's hardly the case. We hear a lot about celebrities that had a troubled past, but what about all the others that also had a troubled past and failed and no one knows about them?

Besides, even with all the motivation "caused because of being poor" isn't enough, there's a lot of other things to consider. For example, the number of working hours just to be able to eat and pay the rent, making someone incapable of pursuing what they really want.

It may be a cliche, I don't deny that, but just because it's a cliche, doesn't mean is not something real, or to put in better words, one of the big obstacles that someone has to endure.

I also agree with the Sylvester Stallone argument. Even though he didn't come from a poor family, he did struggle a lot in his early career to achieve what he achieved. I will add him to the list.

I guess I was speaking from a personal experience, no need to develop it but yeah, life isn't always "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", actually, it can make you meaner, more suspicious, more vulnerable, more instable etc. etc.

It's like the stories of the two twin brothers one became alcoholic because he grew up with an alcoholic father, the other never drunk a drop... because he grew up with an alcoholic father.

There are obstacles all over the place. Poverty seems like more of an
inability to discover a resource in the first place than to overcome an
obstacle blocking a resource, let alone poverty being an obstacle in and
of itself. Some people are just better or worse equipped for various reasons to overcome (circumnavigate, circumvent, assimilate, modify or destroy) certain obstacles. There is a often sharp distinction between people who received much help and people who received little help, from others, at no debt, in learning to navigate the obstacles.

Your abilities, your habits, your erudition (a priori), your experience (a posteriori), your personality, your reputation, your affiliations, your environment and your luck determine whether your fame or your fortune goes up or down. The two things hardest for most people to alter or substitute are personality and luck. Meanwhile, any of the things affect chance just as chance can affect any of the things. Even after millennia of study, there is still no formula for this stuff, unless it is a statistical one, being as it is that chance is a omnipresent element.

NoPantsBatmanTM wrote, "Yes, I realize that she's been in some movies, but, in my opinion, she's
still a long way from being considered a movie star. Every time I hear
the name Oprah Winfrey, actress is the last thing that comes to mind,
not to mention movie star." However, he added Oprah anyway.

Halle Berry - Her physically abusive ???? abandonedJoaquin Phoenix - His four siblings (including River Phoenix) also performed on the streets with him; he was born into the Children of God cult, known for sanctioning sexual abuse of children; his older brother River suffered a drug overdose and died on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room. The call Phoenix made to 911 seeking help for his brother was repeatedly played on radio and television.Richard Pryor - Pryor was raised primarily by his grandmother, a violent woman whoDanny Trejo - I would add that he was in and out of prison for 11 years, starting when he was 14 and spent many years in San Quentin.

Ice-T https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001384/After ETSing from the Army in 1983, he returned to South Central with the intention of becoming a hip-hop musician.More than music, his life got caught up in street life as a jewel thief and as a pimp.

Fred Dalton Thompson https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000669/Worked as a shoe salesman, truck driver, and even a factory workerWas a lawyer/attorney before becoming an actor.For 17 years (1975 to 1992) Thompson worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. representing such clients as Westinghouse, General Electric When he joined the cast of Law & Order (1990) in the fall of 2002,Thompson became the first serving U.S. Senator to take a regular TV acting job. His term did not end until January 2003.

Dennis Farina (1944–2013) https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001199/Actor Dennis Farina is unique among thespians in that he was one of the few to achieve success as a "late-bloomer."He did not start acting until he was 37 years old, after stints in the military and 18 years on the Chicago Police Department

NPBatman;This should go on to Danny Trejo's Mini description. This is how he went from rags to riches.A screenwriter who did time with Trejo in San Quentin, by chance saw Danny on a movie set. He had remembered his boxing skills. The screenwriter went to the trainer and told him of his prowess. They offered Danny $320 per day to train the actors for a boxing scene. Director Andrey Konchalovskiy, who saw Trejo training Eric Roberts, immediately offered him a featured role as Roberts' opponent in the film. The rest is history